Racial integration has fallen off the table of “education reform” offerings. Yet racial integration is a moral imperative, as Martin Luther King Jr. said. And it is even more of an imperative than when he said it since our society is now so much more diverse than it was in the 1960’s. It’s a paradox. We are more and more diverse overall, yet our neighborhoods and our schools are less and less diverse, and increasingly segregated by wealth and race.

Why is school integration a moral imperative? First, only if people of different races and ethnicities interact with each other as young people can they learn the habits of respectful interaction with those who are different. Only then will they gain empathy from learning about the distinctive experiences of people who are different from them. Only then will they learn to see people who differ from them racially and ethnically as equals and fellow citizens. Only then will they be able to participate knowledgeably in democratic deliberation that seeks a common good. Only if young people routinely encounter and learn from those who are different will they be able to build a harmonious society out of their differences.

Racial integration is also a moral imperative because it is the only road to social justice, especially in education. Separate can never be equal. Only if students of different groups attend the same schools can they consistently receive equal educations. And the classes in those schools must also be integrated. Re-segregation inside desegregated schools won’t do. The research is clear that one of the surest ways to diminish the racial achievement gap is through integration. There can be no equal opportunity in education until we have shrunk this gap, between white students on one side and blacks and Latinos on the other.

If racial integration is so vital, why isn’t it happening? It did happen for a while. From 1968 until 1980, there was a strong push to integrate schools, all over the country and especially in the South. This movement was driven partly be judicial mandate, but also by a widespread recognition, at the school district level, among the general populace, that racial integration was better education and was better for society too. And it shrunk the achievement gap too.

But by the late 1980’s, this progress started to be turned around. Why? For a few reasons. One is that over the past twenty years or so, courts have released school districts from mandates to integrate. The nadir of judicial retreat from integration was the 2007 “Parents Involved” case. There the Supreme Court went even further than previous decisions, and said that districts could not integrate if they achieved the integration by using students’ racial identity to assign them to schools (by making sure that schools did not become too segregated). Since race-sensitive assignment policy has been the main way districts have achieved integration, this decision presented a serious obstacle, although it built on previous court decisions that released our society as a whole from rectifying its legacy of racial injustice and segregation.

Another reason for the retreat from integration is that the field of “education reform” is crowded with all kinds of other initiatives which do not include integration, yet have no proven record of improving education for the most disadvantaged students of color—reforms such as paying teachers for improved test scores of their students, opening more charter schools, closing schools whose students score below some defined standard, weakening teacher protections and unions, and constant reliance on test scores to measure students’ educational progress. The evidence shows that school integration, along with funding preschool education and equalizing funding disparities are much more reliable ways to reducing achievement gaps.

The deeper problem here is the failure in most current reform to foreground the civic purposes of education mentioned above—training a new generation in the virtues of civic engagement and understanding for a diverse society. Education is not only to provide individual students with the tools of social mobility and economic viability. It is also to serve a social good, to realize ideals of social justice, mutual respect across differences, and democracy.

One ray of hope on the horizon is a set of guidelines that the federal Departments of Justice and of Education issued in December of last year. The guidelines instruct school districts in steps they can take to achieve integration in their schools, within the constraints imposed by the judiciary, especially in the Parents Involved decision. For example, a district can use residence in a black neighborhood as a basis for student assignment, even though it cannot use the student’s actual race. The guidelines interpret the Parents Involved decision as allowing for a good deal more integrative efforts than did the Bush administration’s guidelines. The Obama guidelines are a ringing assertion of the civic purposes of integrated education: “Racially diverse schools provide incalculable education and civic benefits by promoting cross-racial understanding, breaking down racial and other stereotypes and eliminating bias and prejudice.”

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Lawrence Blum is the Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.  He is the author of the forthcoming High School, Race, and America’s Future: What Students Can Teach Us about Morality, Diversity, and Community.

I’ve been honored to serve this year as President of AME and look forward to the next two years.  I’d like to take this Forum opportunity to  tell membership about an idea that will finally come to fruition on our web-site, an Op Ed section.  This section on our web page will be a place for debate, discussion, and comment, a place where AME voices can be heard about important topics.

The idea for an Op Ed page or AME blog began over 10 years ago when I first was on the Executive Board.  Then President Monica Taylor asked me to make a proposal to the board with regard to how AME work could reach a broader audience through the media.  I presented several ideas and concerns were raised with regard to whether  we could ever agree on one AME position, whether we might have a public relations volunteer who matched up members to journalists when news developed that could benefit from a moral ed/moral development perspective, and whether we could state opinions publicly about certain topics given our 501C status.  After that meeting in Glasgow, the idea of media outreach was dropped.

A few years later, the second time I was on the board, I became concerned when I learned that juveniles in the United States who had committed murders were being executed.  Against execution in any form, I was particularly disturbed by this and discovered there was an important Supreme Court case  (Roper v Simmons, 2005) that was going to decide whether it was illegal.  Several organizations were writing briefs to the court that were in effect letters that presented both an opinion and research to support that opinion.  I spoke to a person from an anti-death penalty NGO who was organizing the briefs for the lawyers presenting the case and he said that such a statement from the Association for Moral Education would be very helpful.   So, at that time, I researched with then President Steve Thoma whether or not we could do this as an organization, feeling fairly certain that the vast majority of members would agree that the U.S. should not be executing juveniles.  I believed we had something unique to say about these juveniles and about their moral development post adolescence.  But our tax status precluded such an effort. Instead I collected names via Larry Nucci’s listserv and sent a petition saying that we were all moral development researchers and educators but did not use AME’s name.  The Supreme Court did make the right decision to not execute juveniles.

Now, as President, I have introduced an idea of an Op Ed page.  My dream for this page is not just that AME members can discuss with each other various theoretical disagreements in the field, but that we can write and respond to essays that look outward to important current events, practices in the field, and issues.  I talked to the board about this and board members Larry Blum and Bruce Maxwell  presented  a proposal that was passed last June (we have online meetings and voting). Since then a committee led by Communications Coordinator Eric Marx and including Larry Blum, Don Reed, Elizabeth Vozzola, and Kaye Cook have been “meeting” via emails to develop the process by which these editorials will be solicited, chosen, and vetted.

My vision for this page on our web site is that members write their opinions about important topics (with the disclaimer at the top of the page that the opinion is not an expression of the official position of AME) and that other members and the public have an opportunity to respond.When there is a particularly relevant and important essay, the committee members send the URL to other listservs and blogs they may be reading.  This is one of the ways the smart and important opinions of our members can reach a wider audience, while it is also a way for us to continue throughout the year the great discussions we have at conferences.

Very soon we will have our first op ed piece up and ready for your comments.   We invite you to propose ideas to Eric Marx or me with regard to writing an essay (about 600-800 words) on a topic of wide interest that also has a moral education/philosophy/psychology slant.   Do you want to respond to Diane Ravitch’s article on School Reform in the New York Review of Books?  Do you want to argue against evolutionary views of moral development?   What is wrong with “three strikes and you are out” policies in schools?   In treating kids gone wrong, have we lost sight of the fact that kids develop?  Given the possible effect of sustained playing of violent video games on development, should they be protected as “free speech” (as the Supreme Court recently ruled)?

I’m very excited about this new project and hope you will start thinking of opinions to share that will stir the community to discussion and be a resource for anyone who happens to come across our web site when searching for more information.    Please let me know your thoughts, either by email or over a cup of one of the many wonderful teas we’ll be tasting in Nanjing.  I look forward to seeing many of you there for what looks to be an exceptional conference!

Sharon Lamb,

President, AME